


continuum

by sundermount



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26237386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundermount/pseuds/sundermount
Summary: What has happened will happen, if you intend it to.(You meet Neil at the beginning, and fall for him the times in between.)
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 71





	continuum

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'ed, all mistakes are my own.

He’s half as old when you meet him again, and his hair twice as wild. His suit jacket is too big, almost hanging off him, trouser hems brushing the ground.

“The name’s Neil,” he drawls, in that lazy way of his. “What’s yours?”

You have adopted so many names, none of which you had any particular attachment to. “Protagonist” would not work, for all its intents and purposes. Not yet.

“John,” you offer, reaching out to shake his hand. “Call me John.”

  


  


In your head, there exists a list of the dates and times you should meet, and will have met. If the intention is there, and the action follows, and the person in question remembers it happening... Well. There is a reason why it is on the list.

  


  


“You look a lot older, man. What the hell happened?”

“Life,” you joke. It’s funny because it’s true. It’s been 3 months for him, but 3 years for you - you’d spent a year and a half inversed, and the last year and a half taking care of some other matters.

You resist a sigh, feeling so much older than your years.

  


  


“So what is it you _really_ do,” he questions over a vodka tonic you order for him one night, in a bar in New Delhi. 

(“I’m more of a rum and coke guy, man,” he’d said.

“And I’m the one paying,” you’d replied.)

You sip at your Diet Coke. It’s growing on you.

The way this young man looks at you is not legal. Not yet in this country, not for a few more years. He is younger, but as beautiful and carefree as he will be in his future (was, in your past) even with the baggage that would come with all his years of knowing you.

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

To him, you have only been acquainted for six months. He has already been in your employ for four of them, overpaid, as what he thinks is a runner for either drugs or organised crime.

“Kinky.”

You do not invite him into your bed that night, but he will do exactly that; extend that invitation to you in the next city you meet in. 

You have already taken him up on his offer. He does not know it yet.

  


  


“How much of me have you already loved?” he asks, the next time you see him. Already, he looks closer to the age you met him at.

“I have only had you once,” you admit. “Paris. The Intercontinental. You had been untouched by a man before that.”

The way he disassembles and cleans a rifle is methodical and sure. You have no question if he would be able to do it in inverse and blindfolded, because you already know the answer.

His hands, much older than you have had the privilege of having, are a lot surer. They know you as a long-time lover, touching you in places you did not know to look nor guide his younger self to; your previous dalliances anonymous and under cover of darkness, with the sole purpose of obtaining relief.

What comes first, the teacher or the student?

  


  


When you finally sleep with him for his second time with you — and it’s starting to get confusing now, because this version of him still does not know, not the way his older selves do, and pretense is only less difficult because of the nature of what you do — you teach him exactly what you had been taught.

You know he thinks it is because you slept with someone other than him. A tricky situation to explain.

Intent, cause and effect. What has happened, happened. What exists only serves to be because you ensured it would, like how this knowledge of yourself would be known by him.

You do not know what will happen if you ever choose not to cast the stone that would cause the ripple. Maybe the memory and all traces of it will disappear, at which point your experiment becomes moot. Maybe an older version of you will accomplish what you did not. You have no way of knowing.

You guide his head to your neck and tell him, _bite_.

  


  


When you come across the tag, the red thread of it still bright and not yet frayed, the thoughts that’d assailed you when you first made that connection come over you again.

Inevitability, accompanied by a dry-sand feeling in your throat.

You buy it and give it to him, the next time you both meet.

“This is neat,” he exclaims, and hangs it off off a backpack that you know will not be with him for as long.

  


  


There is no end in sight. You consult the list and it seems longer than you remember, but you have no idea if it is just an impression or if it has actually grown longer.

And you have no way to know, because it currently only exists in your head.

  


  


“So. Will you ever tell me your name?”

“How many times have you asked that question?”

“In my head? At least thirty. To you? My third.”

His third, you make a mental note.

“I call myself the Protagonist.”

“Cool answer. Not the one i was looking for.”

“It’s the only answer you’re going to get.”

He throws his head back and laughs.

  


  


Tomorrow night, you will whisper your birth name in the shell of his ear, albeit a him that is exactly a year, four days and seventeen hours older.

But that, my dear Protagonist, is a fact neither of you know yet.


End file.
